SOC 101 – Socialization Race and Gender

So I was listening to some sociology 101 SEX&Gender college class from CSUDH. 101 classes seem to be the only kind of college classes that are free, its my way of not becoming a dunce lol. The professor Segio Soto was basically saying that back in the days women were seen as properties of men. (The same way blacks where seen as properties of whites except this is much worst because it’s slavery.)The double standards that exist between men and women are slowly cracking down and I am sure that 400 years from now these double standards will be depleted. (It is like race there are double standards as it concerns blacks and whites, blacks are definitely under more surveillance in society today and maybe after 400 years etc…) The objectification of women and the objectification of blacks, is tied up with their dehumanization which then leads to violence and aggression. To objectify someone, is to dehumanize someone to justify violence against them. There is no violence without objectification and dehumanization. Lynching of blacks in history is an example of objectification, blacks weren’t seen as human beings with emotions and feelings but just seen as objects, dehumanized to justify the infliction of violence against them. And that’s just me repeating the same thing in different words because that’s how I roll. Even up to this day there specks and grains of the black man&woman being dehumanized not like before but it’s still there.

Like race, gender is also socially constructed. Men and women are socialized to behave a certain way, the professor said, “men may say, I’m not emotional, I’m a male, I rarely cry or I don’t cry at all.” because men who cry are seen as sissys or wimps and that’s how we’ve been socialized. And he also stated that as a male child you may have been sanctioned for crying over…anything really, you may have gotten smacked or disciplined for crying. These are all socially constructed notions of how a male should behave. But I won’t mention how society says a woman should behave because it is too obvious to mention. Professor Soto stated that all human beings have the same emotions. It is self-evident that all humans have, feelings of anger, pain, happiness, etc we all have those emotions. This is random but I want to add that we should also be grateful that we do have emotions because it means that we are breathing and we have life and life is the # one most important thing to be grateful for. Anyway, Professor also stated that as children male and females are very similar, but overtime men are socialized not to express emotions, not to be compassionate,to be rational, to be aggressive and violence may even be rewarded. You know I can’t stop bringing up race, it’s like race, children do not bring attention to skin color in anyway form or shape and white kids will play with black kids and notice no racial difference whatsoever add no weight or anything to skin color, until white kids become socialized into thinking race matters, “problems” of race only occur in adulthood as a direct result of socialization. Or I should say kids of all races will see no differences between each other until they are socialized to see it by the respective cultures in which they will be brought up in. As kids we don’t really see each other as different nor do we treat each other as being different until we have been socialized to think that we are more different(than we actually are) and socialized into thinking we have to act a certain way. Human beings are social animals, we think we’re just being ourselves but half the time we are really socialized into thinking a certain way. It’s debatable though how much of the way we act is learnt or socialized and how much is us being our individual selves I’d say fifty fifty. Radically speaking I’d say there is nothing inside of us, nothing we didn’t put inside ourselves, ourselves. We are all living in this one big social illusion, in one society in Africa, men wear make-up not make-up as we see it in the west but body paintings. Make-up is still body paintings and in some societies only the men wear body-paintings. It’s really the power of this social illusion that is governing our lives today, what has been past down socially and culturally from generations to generations.

Sometimes I wonder do we really get wiser when we get older because most of the time how we were as kids are really what we need to get back to. IF you didn’t care when you were a kid why should you care now, and if you care now it is what is holding you back. How we were as kids and didn’t have a care in the world about skin color or gender and how society think a person should act on the basis of skin color and gender. Professor closed off by stating that all of society is a human construction, people got together and created these ideas which are now governing all our lives, these ideas have been built on top of each other, some ideas die, some things change on the surface and some things remain the same. I’m going to close by saying that there is really no difference between men and women more than the biological differences that we have been born with. There is no difference between human beings of different skin color than socially created differences that have been worked up to benefit one group over the other.